The Other Side Of Magic
by Cormac Jeswinnet
Summary: They say a team is only as strong as its leader. Which is all well and good, until somebody takes your leader out of play. A team is defined by what they do then - who they trust, how they pull together, how hard they'll fight to get him back. (Full-length teamfic. Plot, intrigue, villainy, Alma, the whole nine yards. Updates every other day)
1. Chapter 1

Her hair is up.

It's after seven. Her shoes are tucked in neat against the wall, under her hanging coat. The coat is still a little dark across the shoulders from the afternoon's rain but mostly dry; she's been home a while. She's changed the rest of her clothes.

But Alma's hair is still up.

And now that Dylan's looking there are other signs. Like the warped black dish of a microwave meal keeping the trash can from quite closing, and a smell that tells me most of it went uneaten. There are little damp flecks all around the sink where something was scrubbed with a rough brush and no mercy. The note he left when he went out, that he didn't know when he'd be back, is still on the side table where he left it. When he glances at that he catches his reflection in the mirror fixed above it. Could be better. It's been worse, but it's been better. It would be important except that, as has been pointed out, as he can't get out of his head, Alma's hair is still up.

Thank God his own day went smoothly. Thank God he shaved this morning. Thank God it's no longer raining and he hasn't left drips and shoeprints in the doorway.

Before you accuse him of overreacting – or worse, before you have to ask what he's thinking at all – let's just be absolutely clear, it is all the way up. Not tied back, not pushed away from her face, _up_. Twisted and pinned and neatly _up_ against the back of her head.

Alma's hair doesn't go up until she reaches her desk in the morning. Alma can wind in the familiar knot, knock back a four-shot coffee and give a task force briefing all at the same time. It is the very last thing she does to make herself ready, to become the consummate professional she has to be. And she _hates_ it. She pushes and pulls at it every second her hands are idle. By lunch she usually has to take it down and redo it, she's loosened so much of it. Most nights she doesn't make it so far as the train before she lets it go. He's met her once or twice, dashing into the station with a mouthful of pins, hands behind her head looking for the last of them.

And here she is, after seven, on the couch in mismatched sweats and white rabbit slippers which do not fit her because they were a gag gift not to her but to Dylan, and her hair is still up.

He takes an extra second or two over hanging up his jacket. He wants very much to come straight out and ask what's the matter. But that would be wrong. Don't ask him to explain it, he just has this powerful sense that such a direct approach would get him absolutely nowhere and very probably make her mad. But he wants so much to say it he's having trouble thinking of any other way to put it. And in the end he hesitates too long and misses his chance.

A smile instead of _bon soir_ and, "I didn't make dinner. You said you didn't know when you'd be back, so…" She looks back down to the magazine on the arm of the sofa. Sudden and self-conscious, she flips a page, maybe realizing she's been staring at the same paragraph since before the door opened.

With as much casual caution as he's capable of, Dylan crosses the room and sits next to her. He throws half a glance over her shoulder, just to see what she's reading. Alma bristles.

"Good day?"

"No," she says, and says it so lightly she might be saying just the opposite. "You?"

"Total bust. But it's not the end of the world. These things never work out straight away, you just have to keep chipping away at them." While he speaks she is nodding gently. If you didn't know them better, you might think she wasn't listening, but it's not that. Alma really does agree. She agrees in _principle._ Principle is really all they have, given they really can't share the details of their separate secret lives with each other. She nods because he seems to be making sense. Sometimes Dylan gets the uneasy sensation that as much as she ever hopes for is that he will make sense.

Maybe you can imagine, this makes small talk difficult to sustain. Normally neither of them has a problem with silence. Gentle, comfortable. Comforting; there are far worse things than being able to live with someone without constantly having to fill the space between you.

But he really, _really_ wants to ask her what's wrong.

It is becoming imperative. It burns in his lungs like a held breath, begging to break from him. But how can he? How can he when Alma is so determinedly placid, so wholeheartedly committed to this act of nonplussed and easy-going and unperturbed. She is a still pool, except that she's gone the other way with her magazine, and has turned four pages in the last ninety seconds.

Stretching out his arm on the back of the couch, Dylan delicately seeks out the end of one of her hairpins and pushes. When the bent head slips free at the other side of the knot, he picks it out and turns it back between his fingers. He's onto the fourth before she feels a hank slide free and flinches. With a terse little noise, like a groan not quite stifled, "Not tonight, okay?"

"What? No, I was just… helping." _Or I thought I was_ , but he bites that back. That's another one of those bad things, one of those things you shouldn't say, a can-opener of a thing and who knows what might be the can?, no, that's something not to say, that is a thing to remain unsaid...

But he did catch her meaning. He knows what Alma thought he wanted. Maybe, then, space is the issue. Space has been an issue in the past. Dylan learned the hard way about space.

It wasn't his fault, not really. He himself is not into space. The life he's chosen, the vocation that found him, even his own natural inclinations, all of these things have conspired to see to it that Dylan grew up with a whole lot of space. So when things are particularly difficult, when there are problems, when he runs into something he can't handle, space has never been Dylan's go-to solution. When he comes to a bad pass, it is generally because space and isolation and independence have not worked. When Dylan is struggling, he looks for other people.

Alma is more sociable. Not just generally, off-duty, but at work too. She's part of an organization and on a normal day she isn't working against it from inside so there's a considerable difference there. Sort of a yawning chasm of a difference and maybe you'd think Dylan should have spotted it a mile off.

'Should have' and 'did' are not the same thing. The relationship survived the ordeal but he's never been able to shake the suspicion that the final round of yelling might have been what killed Alma's last goldfish.

It is with one eye on its replacement, drifting blithely around its tank and utterly unaware of its own importance, that he gets up and tries to leave her there. At first he does very well, encouraged by the note of mild relief on her sigh as he leaves the room. He gets all the way through showering and changing and does not want to go back to the couch, not for a second. The burning, clawing desperation to just _ask_ her what's the matter subsides. Really it does, it's not urgent at all. He even manages to think of something else for a second, and when he goes to the door of the living room again, it's only because the kitchen is on the other side of it. Honestly. He's hungry. That's it, that's all, no more than that. Dylan wants a sandwich.

But he looks at her. Well, of course he does. To not even look at her, that would be taking things too far in the other direction. She doesn't have to return the favour, it's just that he happens to look in her direction.

Alma's hand is curled up by her mouth. Tiny but insistent, her front teeth click as they slide over and over again off the end of a nail they would like to bite through.

With the uncanny speed of the guilty and caught, her hand flashes away but it's too late. "Okay, that's enough." Forget the kitchen, Dylan sits next to her again. "First the hair and now this-"

"Hair? What are you talking about? Now _what_?"

"You haven't bitten your nails since you stopped smoking!"

Alma draws back. One fussy fumbling hand reaches back to pull the rest of her hair down. She mutters, "That was before I ever met you."

"C'mon, don't change the subject. I see things, it's my job."

"Didn't we agree we wouldn't bring work home with us?"

"Look who's talking."

" _Ah! Bien sur, j'étais la problème. Tu compliques toujours les choses! On était d'accord. J'ai promis de ne rien dire, ne demandes pas. Je me sens déjà mal."_

 _"_ Woah, hang on, slow down-"

" _Ton français ne pas si mal_ …"

 _"_ _Pas mal_ at all, thank you, but you only switch to French when we're disagreeing about something. And I haven't had a chance to say anything you could disagree with. It was a completely unfair language change, it was a linguistic sucker punch. Just give me a sec to catch up."

The slightest flicker of a smile tries to take hold, then slips. She could so easily have glared, have sighed and called him childish, but Alma almost smiles. If anything, it's worse. She's not really angry. All of her warmth and her light are in there somewhere. It's just that something is heavy enough to keep them buried, and she can't forget it for more than just a flicker. "Please." Her voice is soft and choked. Then she draws the deep breath she should have taken before she spoke at all and puts her hand on his arm. "It's work. We don't talk about work."

Because that would lead to all sorts of problems. It's not the legal considerations – she told him all about the Russia-based money laundering operation which was collapsed when they found the eighty-year-old oligarch behind it all trying to see just how many hookers he could fit into a pool. It's so they can't hurt each other. They can't worry about each other. Neither of them will ever learn anything that could compromise the other. There are no moral quandaries because they quite simply don't venture into that territory. They knew all of this from the beginning, came right out and discussed it and came to an accord – in order to have a life together, their lives have had to remain separate.

For the most part they've been sticking to it, and for the most part it has worked.

That's why he tells her she's right. He doesn't feel that way, but he says it. He isn't sorry, but he apologizes. He goes to make her tea and says nothing when he hears her get up, following him to the kitchen. Some dim instinct tells him space is still key. That's why he doesn't look round right away. He finishes what he's doing while she pulls one of the tall stools out from under the breakfast bar. He thinks she settles there.

She doesn't settle. Dylan sees his mistake the second he finally turns. Alma isn't settled, not in any way, not any part of her. She's perched on the edge, lips parted as if she had something to say and forgot it.

He resists just long enough to finish making her tea and his own coffee. When he puts the mug in her hand she looks up as if she'd forgotten where they were. When her eyes stop drifting, his are there to hold them fixed. "Tell me."

"No."

"I hear you, and I hear the reasons, and I tried to agree, I really did. But you're upset. I can't have you upset, not if I can help it. It might not be one of the out-loud explicit promises we made each other but that's only because it's too basic for that. It's a given. So tell me. Even if that's all it is and there's nothing anybody can do about it, tell me. Tell me everything."


	2. Chapter 2

It should not matter in the slightest what Alma chooses to tell, what she chooses to hold back, if she chooses to say anything at all. It shouldn't.

Why should they be different from any other couple? Why shouldn't they do what anybody else does when they get home at night and bitch long and hard about the petty frustrations of the day that went before? Why does that have to be negotiated, why is it painful, why should they be denied such a simple and necessary thing? Why can't they be normal?

Admittedly, none of these questions is all that difficult. Answer the last one and you've probably covered the rest well enough. Their concerns are not petty. Idle office politics would not feature in these fantasy discussion. And, as Alma will learn tomorrow morning, no one will feel any better. There's only guilt and nervousness ahead of her, the irrational fear that it is painted all over her face, Alma told all. Alma spilled. Tomorrow will brim full of brand new torments, fantasies of arrests eluded, trials prejudiced, evidence compromised, because she let secrets go. And those are just the workplace concerns. That's before you even _reach_ any thought of Dylan, and what else could be compromised? Then you come to Dylan himself and that's a whole other mind's worth of fear and anxiety. He's always known what she does, it's how they met, but did he ever think of the danger? When he was secretly her target no one got hurt. Robbed, yes, conned, fine, socially and psychologically crushed, definitely. But not hurt. Has he ever before thought of her in mortal danger, not as a hunter but as prey?

It shouldn't matter what she tells him but it does. In a small apartment in Paris, a frustrated professional rants away her troubles to her partner. She is one of thousands upon thousands doing the same thing at the same moment, all over the world. But it matters

It's too soon to say exactly what the consequences will be but it ought to be stated – here, now, so that blame cannot be shifted later – there are rules being broken in Paris right now.

That's another thing which is happening all over the world. A hell of a lot more than the venting partners, rules are getting broken. Little ones, big ones, laws, important ones, think for just a second how many rules you break in a day. How much stationery you sneak home from work. How often you've parked on the line because you'd only be a second. Think of the times you pretended not to see somebody rushing for the elevator doors, or turned down a side street because there was someone coming you didn't want to speak to. If rules could scream we'd deafen ourselves with breaking them.

For instance, just as Alma's frustrations are changing irrevocably the fates of a dozen people simply by being voiced, there are rules being broken in Hong Kong. Give or take a little time difference, the sounds of their shattering could drown her out. Dozens of them. One on top of the other, falling into each other like dominos, rule upon rule dropping to the ground in jagged fragments.

And will there be consequences? Knowing the Teflon-skinned bundle of arrogance and neuroses doing the breaking, probably not.

First rule down, Danny should _not_ be in Hong Kong. He's supposed to be in Macau. If anybody needs him, they'll be looking in Macau. If anything happens and he needs to be informed, the message will go to Macau. If he is noted missing from Macau, it may well cause a small ripple of worry. If Dylan knew he was no longer in Macau there'd be a hanging in the works. Purely an imaginary one, of course, but beautifully imagined, incredibly detailed, real enough to be just a little bit frightening.

But there's no use crying over a broken rule. Not when so many others are falling by the wayside. It would be unfair to pick one rule out of the dozens. Count them off, see how quickly you run out of fingers and toes – unauthorized travel under a previously-used ID, not telling anyone where he was going, he's out in public – saw a show actually, enjoyed it, he's having a nice evening – might have been recognized – it's fine, she pointed him out of a friend and the friend shook her head, it's fine, they think they imagined it – he's been caught by the security cameras of maybe four different buildings and on the body-cam of a police officer he passed in the street and probably on the avid but palsied personal recordings of an elderly tourist at the show, has engaged at length with various service staff not vetted and known to be friendly and has been generally so unimaginably reckless that whole generations of Eye top brass are rolling in their graves, their mausoleums, their sarcophagi.

And Danny feels _awesome_.

Danny isn't built for these long separations. He understands the need for them and he pretends he can bear it, but they kill him. Months at a time with no audience, that's bad enough. Throw in the limits, where he can go, who he can talk to, where he can eat, what he can do to make the endless hours go by, and really they just ought to be happy he lasted this long. Tonight has been like having a boulder lifted his off his chest. Danny is having the most fun he's had in weeks and absolutely no regrets.

But prepare yourself, because the number of rules broken is about to bloom exponentially, exploding to encompass the social, the legal, the unwritten, the self-imposed and those of the hotel he's visiting.

When the show ends he's one of the first to leave the auditorium. Awfully bad form. He leaves alone, speaks to no one. It probably counts as drawing attention to himself – and how many other rules could be crowded in under that umbrella? He _deliberately_ draws the attention of the receptionist, and does so by pretending his Mandarin hasn't improved at all in all this time alone. Once he's got that he redirects it, sending her looking for lost property that never existed to begin with. While she's out of the way and a less conscientious colleague is transfixed by a local celebrity coming out of the same show, Danny hangs over the desk and looks up the room number of a particular guest.

He's gone before the receptionist gets back, taking the stairs to the first floor away from the crowds. By calling all of the elevators a floor before they can, he gets one to himself.

The room he's looking for isn't quite the penthouse but it's close. There's still that rush, his stomach vanishing, as the elevator rockets into what ought to be only sky. They say you forget the height, when you live with skyscrapers. Danny's never gotten used to it. Something to do with spatial awareness, maybe, something his profession has ingrained into him, but there's a sort of weightlessness that kicks in round about the twentieth floor. It's harder for him to remember he's inside than that he's in the sky.

And even though he isn't there yet, even though it's been a while since he's seen her, he can hear the voice of the person he's on his way to meet. He can hear the smile belie her sarcasm, "It's called being happy. You'd know that if you did it more often. Though I don't really want to think about why it kicks in in elevators…"

When the doors part an older couple are waiting to get in. As they brush by each other Danny dips just the tips of two fingers into the gentleman's pocket and removes their keycard. He reads their room number from it, pleased to find it relatively close to the one he needs. He finds both doors, checking that they're on the same side of the hall. They're only three doors apart. What a stroke of luck.

He lets himself into the couple's room and, because this is enough of an invasion of privacy already, tries not to look at anything on his way to the balcony doors. They're alarmed, but Danny doesn't mind. He puts his shoulder to the sliding mechanism anyway and shoves the door until it gives. Really, he can't even hear the siren. It's designed to be minimally distressing for other guests and there's always quite a breeze forty floors up. That's why they keep the gap between the balconies so small, keeps them from getting too exposed. Climbing from the first to the second he's careful, aware of the unthinkable drop. But he throws himself over the second pair of railings, and the third. At the last gap he simply steps onto the middle bar of the rail, his second foot following to the top, and falls into his next step right there at her door.

It's open. He'd been expecting to have to force that one too. With the alarm already set off down the hall and the door locked from outside, it wouldn't have been noticed. But the sliding door is slid half back, and half a gauzy drape is drifting out to brush the polished concrete. A pair of brown leather gloves with buckled straps at the wrists lies discarded on the outside table. Danny picks them up and takes them inside; there's a trace, just the possibility, of rain in the air.

No need to turn any lights on; the swollen, stretching city glows, a hundred thousand neons, a million tiny bulbs. Even at midnight here the sky is blue, that peculiar lightning shade that seems both to feed and feed off the self-important little dome of a world below.

He beat her here. He's glad of that. It gives him time, when he leaves her gloves on the dresser, to catch up. The exact shade of her hair these days, he finds that on the brush. He finds the print of her lips on blotter tissue and a necklace he's never seen before, a tiny gold rabbit on a fine chain. He learns what perfume she wears now.

You'd think all of that would prepare him, but Danny still jumps when the door opens.

She knows there's something wrong, something different. Wary even before her first step inside. Maybe it's cruel but he lets her stay that way; it's a much needed opportunity to pull himself together, to shake off the surprise. He's been here less than a minute. He thought he'd beat her by more than that.

It lets him watch her too. Her hand on the door in a plainer glove, the first soft sinking of a black patent heel into the deep carpet. By the lights of the city she is red and blue and purple and _electric_ , made of sparking lines and edges as she eases herself inside. She's tense, ready for danger and unafraid of it. Not that Danny ever had any doubts about coming here but if he had, they'd be gone now. Just the sight of her, they'd be gone.

Then she sees what the supposed danger is and slams herself inside.

"That's not funny."

"Hello to you too. Caught your show, by the way, I'm impressed. How are you doing the mirror sequence? I thought you lost those twin assistants?"

"I got new ones. You know you're not as slick as you think, you set an alarm off."

"Down there. Where I'm not. I'm up here. Where the alarm's not." She turns to make sure the door is locked, and hangs her bracelets on the handle so they'll rattle if anybody tries it. She tells him what he already knows, that he shouldn't be here, that he's supposed to be in Macau. But she's covering up. Her nerves at finding somebody else in the room were real. So is her agitation, thinking this is his idea of a joke. But Danny can feel her smiling in the half light. By now he's close enough to feel that and more, both arms working around her from behind. "I was in Macau. And then I heard there was going to be a show in a Hong Kong hotel, not even an hour away, devised and directed by the one and only Abigail Valentine-"

She wrinkles her nose at the name, at the lie of hearing her own cover echoed back to her, "Don't."

Danny corrects himself. Softly, right by her ear so that she can hear it, "Henley Reeves, then," and hear her true self for once. Then tension goes out of her like a sigh at just the sound of it. "I had to come. Consider it checking out the competition. Where'd you get new twins?"

She rolls her head back onto his shoulder, hands reaching for his. "Madrid. Just showed up at rehearsals one day. Figure someday they'll disappear just the same so I'm using them while I've –" Suddenly she turns out of his arms. But she keeps hold of his hands, backing away from him with a smile on her face, "Wait, don't change the subject," but she's playing.

"You know Dylan would one-hundred percent trade any one of us for a pair of twins? It's true, he told me that once, in Monte Carlo. Honestly. In so many words, that's what he said."

"He'd trade you for a _sandwich_ if he knew you were here."

Trying to draw her close again, "Not scared of him."

Henley tips her head and says, with bright innocent eyes and a mean pout, "What changed?"

There's the answer he gives her, which is silent except for the sound of their lips meeting, and the true answer. The answer he gives suits a rule-breaker, suits the night they're having, suits her so well she never returns to the question and in all likelihood forgets she ever asked it. Danny gets away with that because she was kidding. Maybe just because he's getting away with a hell of a lot tonight.

But the charm hanging over him just now does not keep the true answer from scuttling across his mind, black and spidery. Just the slightest flutter in the feeling of absolute, vindicated, self-perpetuating confidence this evening.

Since when isn't he scared of Dylan? Since the day and hour he met Allen Scott-Frank…


End file.
